This fall will see the publication of the
Encyclopedia of Union History, a one-volume, 860-page exploration of Union from its founding to 1990.
The word “encyclopedia” was chosen carefully. The book is not a history in the sense of
a systematic attempt to summarize the past. Rather, it is, as author Wayne Somers '61 puts it, a compendium of historical data.
“Planning this book, I could see two very different ways to proceed,” Somers says. “I
could chart only those roads which lead from the past to the present, or I could also survey the cul-de-sacs and meandering cow paths of Union's past-the roads that seem from our vantage point to have led in the wrong direction or nowhere at all.”
Somers chose the second approach, and the result is a collection of more than 825 separate articles. Most were researched and written by Somers; about 100 were done by others and then edited by him. The reader who wanders through the volume will undoubtedly learn something about Union that he or she did not know beforehand.
Recently we asked Somers to look back at a project that turned out to be far bigger than he-or anyone else, for that matter-had imagined.
Q: How did this
project originate?
A: I'd done some previous writing on Union history, and my friend Jan Ludwig, a professor of philosophy who was co-chairing the Bicentennial Committee, asked me if I'd undertake a volume modeled on Alexander Leitch's A Princeton Companion. President Hull commissioned the work in 1991, and we all thought it could be completed in time for the Bicentennial celebration in early 1995.
I recruited more than fifty people, mostly current or retired faculty members, to write 102 articles on topics with which they were already familiar, and I set out to research and write what turned out to be another 726 articles myself. I was joined in the research by my old friend Ruth Anne Evans, who had just retired from the library. She was an almost infallible source of information and a dogged researcher until her death in 2001.
Q: How did you decide
what to include?
A: We wanted to cast the widest possible net, to reflect the full life of the College over almost two centuries and to give every segment a history. Not just presidents, trustees, benefactors, and academic departments, but sailing clubs and Garnet editors and chaplains and maintenance workers and fundraisers and students in wheelchairs and admissions officers and Jews and women and blacks and basketball players. And we wanted a full spectrum of broader topics, such as curriculum, security, alumni relations, governance, religion, tenure, academic freedom, town-gown relations. We also wanted to re-examine the historical claims commonly made about Union, and either put them on a solid basis or retire them.
Standards of collegiate history used to be disgracefully low, but they've risen a lot in recent years (though not all colleges have noticed that). We tried always to get beneath the surface and to avoid hype; to anticipate the hard questions that would occur to the kind of critical readers Union aims to produce. It will take a few years of use to see how well we succeeded in that, but I suspect we came close to meeting another goal: that no reader, however familiar with the topic, would come away from any article without learning something. There's a lot of detail in this book.
I think one must always start from the tangible, and so the physical campus is covered very thoroughly-there are separate articles on almost every structure, past and
present. As well as the brook, the terrace wall, fences, gates, roads, landscaping. Even
utilities-electricity, water, sewage, telephones are covered. Everything that changed daily life in the past.
Q: How does one research such topics?
A: You can't do it one topic
at a time because most of the sources aren't indexed adequately, if at all. I read, and took notes on, all of the
Concordy and other newspapers, the various alumni
magazines, the Idol and the Garnet and their predecessors, selections from the papers of various presidents and trustees, and many miscellaneous sources. Ruth Anne read and took notes on the trustees minutes. All this reading, of course, turned up new topics that had to be dealt with. The notes went into a computer database on which I drew while writing articles.
Q: Were you frustrated by unanswerable questions, or gaps in the research material?
A: Constantly, because of that deliberate policy of trying to write the full story instead of just fashioning an entertaining article from the materials readily at hand.
The College's earliest decades are the most obscure; there were no student or alumni publications, and
only a few alumni recorded their memories.
Two broader deficiencies also concerned me:
Although the College exists for teaching, there is very little direct evidence of the nature and effectiveness of what went on in the classroom. This is a problem noticed by educational historians generally.
The other deficiency concerns the College's financial history. Plenty of source material survives, but I lacked both the training and the time to make full use of it. Not only is financial history important in itself-most college functions depend on money-but it can often provide useful details about non-financial matters. For instance, in 1809 President Nott announced that Union would no longer offer French. We would have had to assume that French did disappear-the catalogues are no help on this question-if we hadn't found in the treasurer's records that payments continued to be made to the French instructor for the next twelve years.
Q: So it's really
like detective work?
A: It's probably equally undramatic most of the time, but more interesting, because academics, on average, are more intelligent than criminals and-believe it or not-many of them lead more imaginative lives.
We had a couple very
satisfying investigative breakthroughs. For instance, if you like, the Case of the President's Gallstone. Through most of his tenure President Day had vague health problems which some of his contemporaries seemed to doubt had an objective medical cause. In 1933 he had a gallstone removed, but although he was a vigorous middle-aged man, his recovery was so slow that he had to take a leave of absence, and then the trustees fired him, in part because they doubted he would fully recover.
I really wanted to get to the bottom of this, but it seemed impossible. I discussed it with a doctor I knew, who suggested I contact a pathologist at the hospital. It turns out that they keep surgical records for a very long time, and he found the records of the operation, which showed that Day had a bad infection and, in those pre-antibiotic days, would have been plagued with abscesses for a long time.
And then there was the Case of the Mysterious Sculptor. When the statue of Chester Arthur came to Union, the alumni magazine reported the sculptor's name as Ephraim Peyser. Such a commission would surely have been given to a well-established sculptor, but we could find no trace of Peyser in any reference book, or even on Google. Finally Ruth Anne did what academic historians too rarely do: she left the archives and looked for herself, and under Chet's coattails she found the correct name, Ephraim Keyser.
Q: Some people might
doubt that academics have interesting lives.
A: Elias Peissner, who was Lola Montez's lover at the same time as the King of Bavaria, then joined the Union faculty, and eventually died leading troops at Chancellorsville, was sui generis, but Union's first professor, John Taylor, had been with George Washington in the Crossing of the Delaware. President Day was once Oxford-Cambridge heavyweight boxing champion and published three novels. Alan Mozley had to evade murderous brigands to do his early zoological work in Siberia, and Johann Ludwig Tellkampf later served in the first Reichstag.
And in less violent modes, many faculty members have led more than one life: Lawrence Abbott was a well-established writer on music before he converted to economics, and he then published an important book on that subject. In the mid-nineteenth century, Tayler Lewis was simultaneously a much-published Greek and Hebrew scholar and a columnist for Harper's Monthly. Walter Langsam interrupted his academic career as an historian during the Second World War to serve as a division chief in the OSS. Burges Johnson's non-academic life was so full he devoted his memoirs to it exclusively. A college may be a tower, but it isn't ivory and the gates don't lock.
Even when a professor works only in his or her proper academic field, that work can be dramatic if one takes the trouble to understand the context, which we tried to do.
Q: What surprised you
most about the project?
A: When we first look at the past, especially the recent past, we project the present onto it, and then at some point in our investigation the accumulating evidence forces us to reassess. In other words, we set ourselves up for the big surprises.
For example, I was in the Class of 1961, and I had always accepted the old claims that Union was “a balanced college.” Not until midway through the book did I realize that these claims were just beginning to have validity in my student years. A few years earlier, in 1953, when mechanical engineering was added, the engineering faculty increased to fifteen. The arts faculty at that time consisted of an organist who gave a single course in music appreciation, a member of the English Department who also taught theater, and a slot for a professor of art which was not always filled. The library had desperately needed a new building for decades, but Schaffer Library was still eight years ahead because a field house had higher priority.
Q: How current
is the Encyclopedia?
A: To preserve objectivity and perspective, we stopped at the end of the Morris administration-August 31, 1990. After that, a few major changes, such as renovation of the Nott Memorial and the erection of the Yulman Theater, receive brief mention.
Q: Who does the
Encyclopedia see as Union's heroes and villains?
A: No major villains, if you mean people who seriously harmed the institution by exploiting it for their own ends. Even those who did the most damage, such as President Eliphalet Nott Potter, were working, by their lights, for the College's welfare. Eliphalet Nott was a hero and a potential villain; what he did for the College is well known, but it still isn't widely understood that he kept the trustees in the dark while taking financial risks that could have destroyed the institution. And by staying in office much too long, he contributed to Union's decline to near extinction in the late nineteenth century.
Actually, no Union administrator has been as irresponsible as the Board of Trustees was at certain periods. But there was no malice in it; they simply had not come to an understanding of what the board's role had to be. Other institutions had the same problem; Princeton's president once wrote that his board was “full of old dotards and sometimes they go to sleep.”
As for heroes, one has to admire Frank Bailey for his quiet generosity throughout a long life, though unfortunately he embarked in old age on a McCarthyite campaign that nearly did real harm. Walter Baker transformed the board by setting a model for conscientious, hard-working chairmanship for twenty-two years, and incidentally helped to thwart Bailey's crusade. Charles Waldron, the first director of alumni affairs, drew thousands of alumni closer to the College by the simple but rare expedient of talking to them like an educated man rather than a salesman.
Personally, I particularly admire Presidents Harrison Webster and Frank Parker Day as men, though neither was a success in the office. I think Union's unsung hero among presidents is Andrew Van Vranken Raymond. He worked very hard, through thirteen discouraging years, entirely subordinating his ego and his personal welfare to bringing Union back from the brink of insolvency. With minor exceptions, he made all the right decisions, in the right order, and left the College in a far healthier state. And he did it with no previous experience of either educational administration or business.
Q: Does the Encyclopedia include articles on all
these men?
A: Yes. Good ones if I'm not mistaken.
Q: What about
faculty members?
A: We have articles on everyone who stayed at least ten years and died before 1990, as well as several interesting people who stayed a shorter time. My personal favorites are the ones I knew, such as Harold Larrabee and Alan Mozley, but there are many fascinating people from earlier periods: Isaac Jackson, John Foster, Tayler Lewis, Jonathan Pearson, William Gillespie, Cady Staley, William Wells, Henry Whitehorne, Edward Everett Hale Jr., Burges Johnson, Charles Steinmetz, William Bennett. Many, many others.
Q: Alumni?
A: No. We hoped to include 200-300 distinguished non-living alumni, but the book is already very thick and very late.
Q: Does the Encyclopedia shed any useful light on current controversies, such as those concerning fraternities and civil engineering?
A: I think history makes a treacherous servant of politics, including educational politics. One minute it says just what you want it to say, and the next minute it betrays you. It tells you about Union's unique place in the history of fraternities, and that fraternities have played a very useful role in some periods, but it also tells you that fraternities have frequently tended to bring out the worst in their members, to encourage behavior that few students would engage in as individuals, and this despite many briefly successful attempts to reform the system. Eliphalet Nott pointed out the problem in 1846, and it's still true.
Likewise, history tells you that Union was the first liberal arts college to offer a full engineering course, but it also tells you that the College has closed highly successful programs in the past, because they didn't fit a new conception of its educational goals.
Q: For instance?
A: There was a special B.S. in chemistry program-really a chemical engineering program
-from about 1917 to 1950. Graduates easily found good jobs; Carl Frosch, who invented the technique that made possible large-scale inexpensive production of transistors, was a graduate of that program. But when President Davidson took office he saw a program with almost no non-technical content, and he eventually persuaded the trustees that, however successful it was, it didn't belong at Union. There was much pain, and Davidson eventually had to oust the department chairman over the issue. But few people would advocate bringing back such
a program now.
Combatants on all sides hurl lumps of history at each other, and the Encyclopedia will be a boon to them, but I think the only useful thing history can tell us about these issues is that ultimately they'll probably be decided in terms of the institution's present goals and resources. Debates should focus there. That's what Charlie Waldron believed, incidentally, and nobody has ever been more in love with Union's traditions than he was.
Q: If we had a time machine, where would you go?
A: I've thought about it often. I'd like to observe Eliphalet Nott at various periods, because for all that's been written about him, he's still something of an enigma and no one has sufficiently considered his evolution. And if my ticket permitted, I'd stop to watch the moment in 1936 when the freshmen, rebelling against sophomore hazing and rules requiring them to wear beanies, stay off the grass and avoid the front door of Bailey Hall, threw away their beanies and marched across the grass and into Bailey Hall, singing the Marseillaise! So little of past spirit leaves a mark on written history, but some Concordy writer kindly recorded that for us.
Q: Has Union progressed, long-term?
A: Sure. Also regressed and moved sideways. Like most institutions. There are so many different ways of looking at it that drawing up a comprehensive balance sheet is impossible. That's why history is most interesting if you're not trying to prove something.
Q: Any advice for
someone who does a
comparable project at
our 300th anniversary?
A: So much may change beyond our imagining, including the very nature of interest in the past. Collegiate history will long since have matured as a discipline, with methodologies that would probably strike us as bizarre, and one fears that in the distant future responsibility for such books will always be collective and official.
But if I'm wrong about that last, and if a thirst for honest reporting endures, my advice would be: Posit a reader who is smarter than you are, more curious, more critical, and generally harder to please, and then make satisfying that reader your highest priority. Even at the expense of your commitment to the institution, or of methodology, or of your personal relationship with contributors. If there are no such conflicts, you probably aren't doing it right. Worry constantly that the book won't be good enough. Don't just tell What and How; try to figure out Why.
That's really the only kind of book worth making, for the author or for the College.
The Encyclopedia of Union
History, to be published this fall, may be ordered through the College Bookstore at bookstore.union.edu
or 518-388-6188.